Abhijeet Kulkarni

Hi, I'm Abhijeet.

I make things that move, light up and respond, built to last years, not just launch night. Now I'm pouring everything those installations taught me into WorkKit, and building it in public.

  • NowLead R&D Engineer. Kinetic, interactive and event-technology installations, and the electronics and control systems behind them.
  • BuildingWorkKit, engineering intelligence for the teams who deliver this kind of work. Built in the open.
  • ShippedWorkKit Buddy 1.5, a free desktop companion for Mac, Windows and Linux.
  • Open toSelect collaborations, consulting on IoT and installations, and good conversations. I reply within a day.

Selected work

Things I've built.

Permanent installations, a public event, a few product lines and side projects. Each one ran in the real world; the figures are the ones it ran at.

  • Kinetic installationPermanent

    Triblock, a 3×3 kinetic stepper grid

    Nine NEMA 17 steppers driven by a master ESP32 and three column slaves over ESP-NOW, so nothing ever needs pairing. Wave, Ripple and Canvas choreography from a desktop controller; a nine-phone display wall shares the same operator console. Built to stay up: star-grounded 36 V bus, a capacitor at every driver, slaves that re-find the Wi-Fi channel on their own.

    9 motors4 ESP32 nodes36 V · 10 A supply
  • LightingArt-Net

    A 5,880-LED wall and its controller

    A large-format LED wall driven entirely over Art-Net. Flask streams raw UDP to seven ports; a React front end handles live control, routing and video-to-LED mapping, with a WebSocket preview that mirrors the physical wall while you work.

    147 × 40 LEDs7 output ports10 built-in effects
  • Projection mappingPublic event

    Bhuj projection mapping

    Tech operations lead for a large-scale projection-mapping installation in Bhuj, part of a programme initiated by the Prime Minister of India. Ten synchronised projectors, seven sensor inputs, hardware and content crews coordinated to a fixed public date.

    10 projectors7 sensors
  • Event technologyDelivered

    RFID network for a two-day event

    Sixteen UHF RFID readers and eight operator laptops across eight doors, each home-run to a portable rack on a single client uplink, fully temporary. It became the first project extracted into WorkKit's knowledge base, and the document set that shaped how the rest get extracted.

    8 doors16 readers2 days
  • LightingSculpture

    Pyramid LED controller

    Real-time control for a 136-tile LED pyramid across two Art-Net nodes: Live, Assign, Paint and Inspect modes, seventeen effects tuned to the pyramid's geometry, and tile mapping you can edit live.

    136 tiles3,264 LEDs17 effects
  • RoboticsDobot · ESP32

    Automated Barista

    A coffee-serving robot: Lua choreography drives a Dobot arm through the pour-and-serve cycle while an ESP32 layer coordinates the peripherals around it. Delivered with the connection plan, the user journey and the documentation, not as afterthoughts.

  • EmbeddedESP32 · Android

    WT32-SC01 firmware suite

    Four interchangeable firmwares that turn one touchscreen module into different bench tools: a screen mirror, a system HUD, a BLE phone companion and a bench widget. Plus a from-scratch Android app with MediaProjection capture and JPEG streaming to match.

    4 firmwares3.5″ 480 × 320
  • PersonalIoT · Haptics

    VibeLink

    A device for two people far apart: paired ESP32 units exchanging real-time tactile feedback over a wireless link. Custom firmware, haptics and a companion app. Embedded engineering in the service of a feeling.

  • Also made: Smart Display, a wearable notification device across three hardware variants · a two-node environmental sensor dashboard with zero-config discovery · an R&D tracker in Flask and SQLite that replaced a SharePoint sheet · WealthWise, a privacy-first personal-finance app for India · Living World, a self-running ecosystem simulation · six-plus Android companion apps in Kotlin and Capacitor.
Building WorkKit

The other half of the job.

Anyone can call a language model. The hard part is having something true to hand it.

Every installation I've worked on produced the same paperwork: a bill of quantities, a cost estimate, a quotation, an invoice. The knowledge inside those documents — real rates, real specifications, the assumptions that quietly decide whether a project is profitable — is the most valuable thing a delivery team owns, and it usually lives in old spreadsheets and one person's memory.

WorkKit is where I'm putting that knowledge to work: versioned, traceable, and refusing to serve anything unverified. Business rules do the arithmetic; the model only writes the prose. It is early, it is being built in the open, and the site says exactly what is finished and what is not.

Kit, the fox character from WorkKit Buddy

WorkKit Buddy came first, because it was fun: a small desktop companion that dances to your music, delivers your notifications in person and mirrors what Claude Code is doing. Free for Mac, Windows and Linux.

About

The path so far.

I started on the ground, running events and campaigns, moved into design, and ended up with a soldering iron. Both habits stayed: things have to work on the day, and they have to feel right to the person using them.

  1. First

    Operations, events and campaigns

    On-ground delivery for brand activations and large-scale campaigns: crews, schedules, the day itself. Where the respect for things that have to work on the day comes from.

  2. Then

    UX/UI designer

    Interfaces for event tech, apps and immersive experiences. Where the habit of thinking about the person on the other side comes from.

  3. Then

    Technical operations manager, R&D

    Owning delivery end to end: strategy, on-ground execution, and keeping creative, technical and production teams pointed the same way. Projection mapping, VR, immersive installations across South India.

  4. Now

    Lead R&D engineer

    Designing and building permanent kinetic, lighting and interactive installations: distributed ESP32 control, power and motor systems, Art-Net lighting, sensing, and the Flask, React and Android surfaces that operate them.

Reliability and electrical safety come first, because installations are judged over years rather than opening nights: star-grounded power buses, per-driver capacitors, ventilated enclosures, firmware that recovers on its own. Complete specifications before anything is built. Diploma in Electrical & Electronics Engineering, NVS Polytechnic.

Embedded & firmware

ESP32, S3 and C3 · Raspberry Pi · Arduino C/C++ · ESP-NOW mesh · LovyanGFX touch UIs · BLE and Nordic UART · stepper and TB6600 motion control

Control systems

Art-Net and DMX512 · TouchDesigner · NeoPixel LED systems · WebSocket previews · mDNS discovery · USB-serial protocols · LiDAR and biometric sensing · projection mapping and VR

Software & interfaces

Python, Flask, SQLite · React and TypeScript · Vite and Tailwind · Node.js and Capacitor · Kotlin for Android · UI/UX from Figma to shipped screens

Delivery

End-to-end activation delivery · cross-team coordination · power-system safety · hardware bring-up and bench testing · technical documentation

  1. Listen and scope. The brief, the constraints and the audience, and what success looks like, before touching tools.
  2. Plan and prototype. Delivery plan, timeline and stack, then the riskiest assumption gets tested first.
  3. Build and rehearse. Dry runs and contingency plans, so we arrive on site already battle-tested.
  4. Ship and learn. A clean run on the day, a clean handover, and notes for the next one.
Contact

Say hello.

An installation, an activation, a product idea, or just a conversation about kinetic things. I reply within 24 hours.